Alligators of Abraham by Robert Kloss Read Free Book Online Page A

will do what I must so that this will never happen to you,” except he several times called you “Walter.”
    â€œWe must quiet our nightmares now”
    And so many sons dead, and buildings burned, and cities cindered. And these fields where bodies lay mounded for the hogs to root. And the blood-stained lockets of lovers clasped in cold hands. Entire towns were diminished. And no longer did anyone care, on either side, to fight any further. Yet the war continued—
    The war continued and the fur and leather factories were emptied of so many workers, of the sounds and smells and attitudes of those who shoveled heaps of pelts from steamships and wagons, those workers who shot the Flanders Farm mink and marmot and bison with bolt guns, those who slit open the animals and cut free the fur, those who cleaned and softened the fur, those who removed what flesh remained and those who stretched the fur, those who leathered the fur and dyed the fur, those who bleached the fur and cut the fur, those who carried the carcasses and ground the carcasses and gathered the extraneous clumps of meat from the floors for “Flanders Sausage” and “Flanders All-Purpose Canned Feed.”
    And there were those who proposed hiring women and the unpaid. Your father disapproved, and your father wrote to your grandmother, who held no sway, and to managers who cared none for your father’s opinions, and he said, “The unpaid will not work to our standards,” and he said, “Paying them will be of negative influence. The unpaid must be made to labor and even then only simple tasks for the brutes.”
    The war continued and fathers and older brothers and uncles and cousins died. Remember the blonde boy who went missing from class, the boy whose empty desk day after day filled the classroom, the girls theorizing he had died of the pox and others said diphtheria, before finally your teacher said that this boy had lost his father in the war, and when he returned the girls brought him sandwiches wrapped in twine and wax paper, and cookies baked the night before, and they led him behind the schoolhouse and “we just held hands” little Sarah Westerberg in pigtails told her friends loud enough for you and the other boys to hear, this little blonde boy who left the classroom for weeping fits, this little blonde boy who thinned, whose under-eyes blackened, this boy you watched in the midst of girls and pigtails and presents and cooing. This boy you watched with your friends, mumbling, “I wish my father got killed,” and how that night you prayed unto the Lord for forgiveness.
    â€œI cast them out as dirt in the streets”
    This war continued and lines of unpaid coiled outside the factories, the apples they peeled with pen knives, their silent watching.
    And there were nights you woke believing your town thundered with the boots of soldiers, with the songs of rebels, and you woke in the night thinking they were burning the houses with clumps of flaming grass, and you woke in the light of the moon and believed it the fires of houses and schools and shops, and you dreamed the land became as one under those fires.
    This war continued and the rivers became choked and sodden with the corpses of men in gray and blue woolen uniforms, bloated and their skin gone yellow or brown or black, those men shot or gouged miles downriver. Their bodies fished out by unpaid workers recompensed with one hand-me-down trouser for every ten bodies. Or these bodies fished out of the water with bayonet tips by fat bellied militiamen swilling from flasks of whisky. The rotten and pulverized bodies of dead men piled onto docks and skiffs and those in gray burned in pits, the sky choked black with their fumes, the bodies of the men in blue buried in mass graves while “Taps” was played.
    And no more the noise of steamships, the chattering of passengers, of natives and trappers and traders long away from what they